Andrew Coyne: Tories, NDP abandon principles for populism, making the two parties almost indistinguishable

Andrew Coyne: We need a party that will challenge the populist consensus

The other day, the House of Commons was treated to the sight of an NDP member of Parliament, Glenn Thibeault, fulminating during Member’s Statements in a parody of Tory MPs too numerous to mention. “The Conservatives are imposing a $36-billion car tax on Canadians! This car tax will increase the price of cars first by $700, then by $1,800! Who would ever be foolish enough to impose a $36-billion car tax on the shoulders of Canadians!”

If the MP’s point was to mock the crude monomania of the Conservatives’ relentless campaign against the NDP’s “$21-billion carbon tax,” it was well taken. Except… it is a car tax. New fuel efficiency standards, unveiled by the Environment minister, would indeed add $1,800 to the price of a new car — part of the government’s all-regulatory approach to combating global warming. As such, it is almost certainly costlier, per tonne of emissions reduced, than the alternative, tax-based approach economists would prefer. Among other reasons, by reducing the per-mile cost of driving it gives drivers every incentive to drive more.

So the NDP is perfectly within its rights to call this a car tax — as the Tories are within their rights to call the NDP’s cap-and-trade scheme a “carbon tax” (in practical effect, the two are identical). Both parties, that is, are telling the truth about each other’s policies. It’s just that neither wants to tell the truth about its own.

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It is true that, not so long ago, the Tories proposed the same policy (more or less) for which they now denounce the NDP. That makes them hypocrites, not liars. But what’s common to both parties is that neither is willing to admit that its environmental policies would cost consumers, as opposed to a handful of “big polluters.”

So for all the plaudits Thibeault received, it was an odd performance. He wasn’t objecting to the policy — though the NDP is for cap-and-trade, one suspects this would not be in place of fuel efficiency regulations, but in addition — so much as he was saying, you’re just like us.

Which is the deeper, darker truth. I keep reading pundits claiming Canadian politics is growing ever more polarized, but the evidence is all in the other direction. Whatever their surface differences, what is more striking is the similarity between the NDP and Conservatives, so much so that one might almost say they shared the same philosophy. It isn’t conservatism or socialism on which they have converged. It is populism.

It is about harnessing popular fears, prejudices and superstitions in the service of winning power

Because of its name, populism is often falsely supposed to be about giving more power to the people. In fact it is the opposite: it is about harnessing popular fears, prejudices and superstitions in the service of winning power. As a rule the NDP prefers to menace the public with the spectre of Big Business; the Conservatives tend more to rely on Big Government. But the pitch in both cases is the same: you need us to defend you from these hobgoblins.

Both, that is, put the emphasis on power, discretionary and unconstrained, and on politicians as the executors of it: instruments of the popular will, to be sure, but the popular will as it is divined by and through them. And while both will quote expert opinion when it suits their purposes, both are as quick to discard “so-called experts” when convenient, notably with regard to the economy.

Populist economics is difficult to categorize. It is more a bundle of “common-sense” beliefs, things that “everybody knows,” than any coherent doctrine. These sometimes resemble market economics, but only so far as it overlaps with what “any fool can see” — that is, with effects that are immediate and apparent, rather than secondary and counter-intuitive. Thus, pop economics is not opposed to free trade, provided it is reciprocal, inasmuch as it identifies the benefits of trade in terms of more exports, rather than cheaper imports.

We can’t be the boy scouts of the world

In its practical, common-sense way, pop economics considers government support for private industry to be a bad idea if the company fails, but not if it succeeds. It is particularly concerned with the need to compete with other countries, many of whom subsidize their own industries (“we can’t be the boy scouts of the world”). It is acutely aware of the jobs that would be lost if an industrial subsidy were removed, but dismisses as theoretical the jobs the same subsidy has surely destroyed. It has, that is, no concept of opportunity cost: of the alternate uses to which the same funds might have been put, of the jobs that might have been created but weren’t.

As I say, you could as well imagine a present-day Conservative spouting this nonsense as any New Democrat. Indeed, Tories often outdo their opponents in asserting things that “everybody knows” about the economy: not only that businesses never pass on costs, for example, but never pass on cost reductions either, competitive forces being a naive fantasy. The environment minister was lately heard justifying his pro-regulatory stance on the grounds that there was “no guarantee” raising the price of carbon, as through a carbon tax, would lead to any reduction in emissions. Why, the only people who believe that are economists.

There will always be a populist party in our politics. There is probably room for two. The question other parties might wish to ask themselves is whether we need a third — or whether there is an opening for a party that would challenge the populist consensus. Instead of appealing to voters to entrust it with ever more power, it might instead propose giving power back to them. It would give power to consumers to hold business to account, via pro-competitive market reforms. It would give power to voters to hold government to account, via pro-democratic parliamentary reforms. I can’t think who that party would be, but I can see the opportunity to define politics along this axis.